Asteroid Blues

The 14th regiment's first deployment in the low gravity of Novyy Bangkok was a great delight for Juarez, the Santiago assigned to accompany them. Her laughed at everyone but Joan, because, will, she's Joan.

There's been a lot of talk about collateral damage and not wanting for PanO to suffer a PR loss while operating in the Human Edge. Regardless, there were some forces looking to get the jump on exploiting a bad situation, and it had to be stopped. We were deployed to eliminate and detain a number of suspect persons, and there would likely be resistance. Time to grease up the wheels, sharpen the swords, and fly into battle! (Carefully)

Meeting Saladin here was a great surprise, and one that cost us strategic advantage. Our eagerness to get the task done and be gone hard lead us straight into an ambush. The spot was perfect for them, leaving us exposed, little room for manoeuvring, and lots to do. The Daylami must be comfortable with the Asteroid, for they had positions to lock down so much of our DZ.... Joan aggressively pursued and eliminated one threat while I (Teuton NCO) downed the other - killing it outright, but breaking the fireteam so as not to jeapordize them.
Joan proceeded to move cautiously to eliminate a Daylami in enemy lines, careful not to catch the panzerfaust it was packing. She then handled the Lasiq toting her viral sniper and cleared the field. Ending in suppressing fire to cover avenues of approach and lock the Haqq forces deep, we braced for the counter attack.

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The Ghazi came out and couldn't get their smoke canisters to fire. I think the canisters were catching the bullets as none of our hits seemed to fell the threats. Saladin decided that Maggie was the best solution to the problem, so got her to push aggressively. That she did, firing innumerable bullets across the face of my (re-upped) fireteam. A lucky angle meant that Maggie caught 2 unopposed panzerfausts, but she must've had smoke grenade armour as well since she bounced most of the saves. She limped along, going Joan hunting, and surviving incoming fire to ditto the suppressing fire of Joan.

Well, there Maggie was. Extremely wounded, but with a 360 visor, in suppressive fire, in the middle of the field. So I did what any leader would do - I asked our Order Sgt if he wanted a promotion. I'm not sure what he answered, but he was ordered to fire his HRL at Magged and see what happened. To our fascination and utter delight, she went up in a deluge of fire and left nothing. Not even that cute pilot to rescue.... Our KotHS decided that we wanted consoles and to actually do the mission, so she went around pushing buttons and gaining intel. Her first lead was a bad one, so she scooted to the next dump. We had resources to commit elsewhere before she could follow-up, however, so Crusty the Crusader walked in to lock in the engineer before he got any wise unmasking-like ideas. Our promotion-worthy Order Sgt then decided to prove it wasn't luck and fired a doozy of a volley at a very conspicuos Muyib. We won the mirror match and pushed up. KotHS finished our little forray with good intel, and we could hear Saladin start to wimper.

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The gutsy engineer popped around the corner and knocked out Crusty, but doing damage in return. In a tough spot, he ran a chicken up for the intel he wanted, and set up what little he could for a last-ditch effort - assuming they were around to dig those ditches....

(Our Warcor apparently fell asleep at this stage and left us with little footage!)

KotHS did what she does. She ran the length of the field, kicked out the Haqq from the info terminal they had, lit the last target, and put down the true HVT. She then handed the baton to Joan. Joan took that baton and went to the races. Using her mobility armour, she flew in, killed a decoy, killed the Barid killer hacker, and lapped around to get the final decoy. Just for fun, she decided to play shoulder shots with this last decoy only to find out that, apparently, this decoy was better with a stun pistol in CC than she was! Three rounds later, Joan was still trying to land a hit that would also fell this silly data analyst (whose job it apparently was to analyse Joan's CC, and he did it well!) (**OOC: I know why Joan couldn't do it - I'd painted the model for Alem, and Joan was afraid of scratching the paint ;) **).

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Knowing there was only one thing left to do, eliminate my HVT, this lonely Ghulam FO went straight to work. He tanked 3 flashpulse hits to sneak around the far side of a little hut and crit my HVT dead! I'll report him to O-12, don't you worry >=}

We ended up taking the game 9-3, though that last turn swing was certainly a thing. The sheer volume of armour saved past by Alem was staggering - I'm not complaining though, as that meant I was winning the f2f, which shouldn't happen as much as it did. Great game, great sport. A tough play to not take back the order exposing him to b2 panzerfaust, but that also made be play a tighter game. I was happy for no Fidays, but 2/2 Daylami succeeding put me on my back foot off the get go. Oh, and Stragetgos is rough. Oh, and don't Holo2 your KotHS as a trauma doc - she'll still a specialist and still has a target painted on her. Lessons learned :D